Rosary
by cognomen
Summary: Short, Desmondcentric piece. Living life in counts of 108.


His body jerks awake, ears registering dream-beeping that his brain has become hard-wired to spring awake for. He sits up, ready to slide off of his bed, hit the floor moving, and punch in the code.

Only, there was no beeping. There was no more code. The computer was gone. And as there was no sign of the island imploding, Desmond had to assume one of two things. Either the code he'd punched in roughly every 106 minutes of every day and night of the past five years had done nothing except reset an alarm, or the castaways best excuse for a technician had fixed the computer. He wasn't about to go back and find out.

There were no watches - and, he'd long since discovered little meaning in time - but he guessed about a hundred and five minutes had passed since he'd gone to sleep. Time lost meaning, he measured by minutes in the hundreds now, no longer ticking time by the hours, but by cycles of time he had until the buttons had to be keyed. His fingers twitched, still half-lost in the dream of waking in his bunker, cozy under sheets and blankets rather than in the open air of the jungle.

The air, he noted while yawning, which tasted like the jungle had suddenly invaded his mouth. Hot and sticky, full of old leaves and underbrush - he could almost taste the plants after the sterile air of the bunker. He could feel the damp and hot, collecting in the inward curve of his lower spine and under his chin. He'd thought he'd be free once he'd left the bunker and it's world-saving responsibilities behind, but Desmond was still chained. He suspected he'd always sleep in fits and starts and wake with the beeping going desperate in his ears, telling him - not enough time, not enough time to cross the bunker and enter the code. Wake up. Run. 

His body refused to believe that sleep was safe. On the one hand, he had to agree with it. The island was under quarantine - it made people sick, there were sick people here. He had vaccine, but only enough for so long, and when it ran out, he supposed he'd be sick too. There was a cave, and though it was uncomfortably close to the shore - he could walk less than a hundred feet and be out in the open, it was concealed enough to sleep and huddle in, He counted the minutes by hundreds as he sat, paranoid. It was as far from the bunker as he could make it in a straight line and a hurry. So far, it had proven secure.

The one problem lay in the fact that he had filled his backpack with only a very little food - in fact, it was mostly vaccine, which was more important. In theory, food could be hunted, gathered. He knew the basics, the general idea was to stab food-type animals with a pointed implement or catch them with a net. Theory was harder to apply when paranoia prevented him from leaving the cave he'd found shelter in.

He counted slowly, willing his body to relax. As seconds pass, it wound up, tensing for an explosion that he was fairly sure wasn't coming. He didn't know for sure. He breathed in, exhaled. Counted. Stopped at a hundred and eight, his mind fixating on the number as this round of minutes passed. He could feel his body switch over to relaxed as his mind became more and more sure that the time had passed - uneventfully.

Moronically, he couldn't stop thinking about how much he missed the amenities - a training bike, a real bed. Music that wasn't stuck in his head like a horrible flashback to the seventies that never ended. His muscles were cramped and sore. He hadn't seen the outside in so long that he was almost afraid of it, like he could feel sickness creeping through the air, trying to crawl in through his nose and mouth.

Jack hadn't seemed sick, when he'd seen him. But they could be carriers. They could be -acting-. While some part of him told him that it was baseless phobia, he still could not go back and find out. Maybe -he- himself was getting sick, and the consuming mania was part of it. Perhaps it was like the flu, and it had outgrown the vaccine.

Perhaps the vaccine had never been any good in the first place.

He didn't feel sick. He felt out of shape. He was so used to perpetual movement - running or biking or rushing for numbers, that holding still made him feel slow. Turned his body to a jittering, nervous mass that felt the need to do -something-, so instead it thought. rapidly. Turned his thoughts round and round like an animal in a wheel, fretting and spinning away but never getting anywhere.

What he needed to do was run. Until he was completely exhausted, and then he would be able to sleep through his body's natural alarm. The problem was that he was afraid to move, even. Afraid that if the Island noticed him, it would send him mad.

It took him to a count of 48 before he realized he was already going mad. It was holding himself back that was driving him crazy, not any sickness or some will of the Island or a God he hadn't thought about since grade school. He was holding himself back. It had always been his pride that he didn't have to hold back, that he could push on and his body would follow, fit and ready to run. He was ready for a race around the world when he'd met Jack the first time.

Now he had only the Island, but that was a world too.

He burst out of the cave, muscles screaming protest and mind telling him wait, to go back, he'd forgotten the vaccine. His body seemed to drag, numb and cramped in places. It remembered running, though, and he remembered how to fall into the swing and piston of legs. The switch and balance of arms. His shoes and clothes were wrong - cumbersome and long. The terrain was bad, sand sucking at his sneakers.

He didn't care. Desmond had a world to race around. 


End file.
